Why Workplace Culture Matters
Culture is as important as a business strategy. It either strengthens or undermines your organization’s goals. Fostering a culture unique to your organization nurtures engagement and fuels innovation. And one of the most valuable tools to reinforce the culture and drive business strategy is workplace design.
How do you create a work environment, an Organic Workspace, that serves as the physical expression of your company’s culture, brand, and business strategy—a place where employees work effectively, happily, and develop new ideas that grow revenue?
Empowering employees to drive innovation starts with understanding organizational culture
What is Culture?
Culture is the personality of an organization and includes three basic components:
• Values
An organization’s mission and how it represents itself
• Assumptions
The attitudes formed through company processes and actions that inform what employees think
• Artifacts
What a company represents in the form of products, services, processes, publications, dress code, location, and their work environment
Organizations have a primary culture and—oftentimes—numerous subcultures. It’s important to recognize the predominant culture profile as well as the subcultures to provide workspaces that harness the ways in which teams work.
Discover Your Culture
To create a culture profile, it’s useful to lay the values, assumptions, and artifacts of a company into a framework that reveals its basic tenets. The Competing Values Framework™ provides this structure, and emerged from research demonstrating a link between culture type and organizational effectiveness.
Haworth partnered with Innovation, a global leader in innovation, to leverage this framework as a key element in creating high-performing work environments. The Competing Values Framework creates a foundation for purposeful workplace design, resulting in a mix of spaces that help your people do their best work.
